Self-taught mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan had a brilliant but brief life. In 1920, at the age of 32, he died from a combination of illness and malnutrition. Before he passed, he filled various notebooks and manuscripts with nearly 4,000 results and conjectures. These documents have inspired mathematicians ever since, helping solve various conundrums and inspiring new fields of math (See “The Oracle” by Ariel Bleicher in the May issue of Scientific American). Here is a timeline tracing Ramanujan’s intellectual legacy.

12/22/1887 Ramanujan (R) born in what is now Tamil Nadu, India. He shows an immense talent for math from a very young age

1/16/1913 Isolated from the greater mathematical community, R sends letters to several prominent English mathematicians. On this date he mails his first fateful letter to G.H. Hardy, who invites him to the University of Cambridge

4/14/1914 R arrives at the University of Cambridge. He has a fruitful five years of collaboration with Hardy

2007 Ken Ono and his colleagues use their development of the mock theta functions as the holomorphic parts of Maass wave forms to obtain a general theorem that has corollaries to the mock theta conjectures

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